Double game on Navalny: the stability of the Putin system and Merkel’s European leadership are at stake

4 September 20204 years ago babelfish

It is unlikely that Angela Merkel had not calculated the possible consequences of Alexey Navalny's arrival in Berlin in a coma. Yet the case of the poisoning of Putin's most famous opponent risks putting his leadership to the test far more than one could imagine. When on Wednesday afternoon the military laboratory entrusted with the analysis confirmed the presence in the victim's body of a nerve agent from the Novichok group, the German government's response was blunt: " It was an attempted murder with a chemical substance, which raises serious questions that only the Russian government can answer, ”said a visibly shaken Merkel. She was echoed by Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, who immediately asked the European Union for " an adequate reaction to the gravity of the facts ". The Germans for the moment, beyond the inevitable statements of fact, however, have been careful to avoid saying what they plan to do them, that the Europe-Russia relations are the true custodians. On any decision hangs a mortgage from which it will be difficult to free themselves, despite the pressures coming from Washington, that Nord Stream 2 to which the Chancellor had referred with some timing right at the end of August, freeing its completion from the geopolitical events of the continent: " The Navalny case and the murder of a Chechen rebel in Berlin must be kept separate from Nord Stream 2, which is a private economic project and as such must be carried out ”. An argument that is actually rather spurious since the company in charge of the execution of the pipeline is the exclusive property of Gazprom , controlled directly by the Russian government: it is an agreement between states, therefore, not between private individuals, and as such has an undeniable political significance.

But let's go back to poisoning. When we talk about Novichok we refer to a potentially lethal chemical weapon, developed in its different variants first in the Soviet laboratories and then in the Russian ones starting from the 70s of the last century. Never used in combat, it is instead believed to be the substance of the attack committed by the Russian secret services against former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, in the English town of Salisbury more than two years ago. If it is not a smoking gun, we are close to it, since this kind of poisons is only within reach of subjects linked to military circles or to the state security apparatus. This is why, as soon as the news spread, the Novichok was almost unanimously interpreted as the Kremlin's signature on the attack on Navalny. The counterattack of Moscow and the pro-Russian sites was not long in coming: a few minutes after the official statement from the German government, the online magazine Sputnik published a statement by Leonid Rink, identified as one of the architects of the Novichok , according to which the symptoms presented from Navalny would not be compatible with those of the indicated substance. The official defense of Russia basically consists of one question, always the same: where is the evidence of our involvement? Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, even went so far as to insinuate that the poisoning may have occurred on German soil, stating that "as long as he was in Russia there was no trace of poison in his body ". If it is true that Russian doctors immediately administered atropine to the patient – official sources confirm – it was only as a precaution, since Navalny suffered a sudden glycemic shock of natural origin that caused him to go into a coma. How did the German laboratory identify the chemical agent? In what conditions did Navalny leave Omsk for Berlin? Why did the German doctors refuse the initial offer of assistance from the Russian colleagues who had treated him in the beginning? These are the issues around which the Russian denial machine will move in the coming days. By now, however, the Navalny case has taken on an international dimension which risks blowing up the increasingly delicate balance of Moscow power, already severely tested by the Belarusian crisis.

But because Putin would have decided, right now, to physically eliminate a potential opponent that he had already politically gotten out of the way through the courts and, definitively, with the latest constitutional reform (which prohibits the candidacy of those who have lived abroad) ? Kremlinologists are questioning and, in general, are skeptical about the possibility that the president or his closest entourage ordered the poisoning, arguing that such a decision would cause far more problems for the head of state than it would help solve. If, however, before the Novichok it could be thought that other subjects might have an interest in settling accounts with Navalny, for personal purposes or to do " a favor " to the president, after the confirmation of the nerve agent the circle around the Kremlin tightens (Nemtsov, Politkovskaya, Litvinenko, Yuschenko are the most illustrious precedents). True or not, since Wednesday it has been harder for Putin to convince the international community of his innocence. As long as he's interested in doing it.

In reality, since 2014, the year of the annexation of Crimea and the proxy war in the Donbass, just at the moment when Russia's expansive ambitions seemed to be manifesting themselves in their fullness, the Putin system has entered an involutionary phase, in which the supreme good of internal stability (read conservation of power) has turned into a real state ideology. Even the political and war incursions aimed at avoiding the sliding of Kiev into European orbit were mainly aimed at a public opinion that sought and found in the strong man who had brought it back as a protagonist on the international scene a confirmation of its relevance. Today this centralizing and solipsistic trend has become accentuated to the point of being fixed in a constitutional reform, approved with the usual plebiscite, which locks down Putin's mandate well beyond the natural deadline of 2024.

In analyzing the prodest of Navalny's poisoning, one must take into account this retreat of the regime (we can now call it that) on itself: rather than safeguarding an already seriously compromised international image, Putin seems worried about consolidating his authoritarian over Russian society. Whether or not he is the instigator of the attack, the Navalny case serves the president to signal to his population the borders within which he can move and the limits that cannot be exceeded. Putinism denies its involvement with the international community more out of duty than out of conviction, as well as to prepare itself to interpret – always from an internal perspective – the role of victim in the event of further sanctions; but at the same time he neither condemns nor undertakes to shed light on the facts and does not hide the fact that Navalny's exit is functional to his autocratic project: the name of the anti-corruption activist cannot officially even be pronounced. The Russians must know how the enemies of the Kremlin end up: in a coma, in a hospital bed. The real question then, in a presidency that the more it perpetuates itself the more it risks resembling a failure (economic stagnation, conflicting relations with almost all the nations of the former Soviet space, reduction to the role of regional power, increasing dependence on China), is to what extent and for how long are citizens still willing to respect the non-aggression pact stipulated with power twenty years ago, at the price of increasing isolation and distancing from the West and with the Belarusian awakening at the doorstep. An awakening that Navalny has followed and documented in detail, as long as he could, on his YouTube channel .

The reversal of the German position is evident at this point: asking Russia to answer the questions of the West is an error of reasoning, a non sequitur . Putin has already chosen the path that his country will have to take in the coming years, and it is not precisely a path that leads to Europe. His plan for the annexation of Belarus, which is crumbling under the perplexed eyes of an incredulous and unable to react community leadership, is further confirmation of this: for Moscow Lukashenko is the past, the future is Putin who is in fact transforming himself in his stunt double. Contrary to what Merkel says, it is Russia's progressive sliding towards the category of failed states that must find an answer from the European Union in general and from Berlin in particular: what is really meant to be done to stop this drift?
From today, despite himself, a double game is being played on the halved body of Navalny in the center of political Europe: on the one hand, that of the stability of the Putin system, whose officials will not be able to set foot beyond the Elba without being asked about Novichok but whereas, at the same time, it has survived practically unscathed evidence far more decisive than this, including a battery of sanctions which German companies themselves have had no difficulty in circumventing; on the other hand, that on the proverbial European hypocrisy, which Angela Merkel has had a unique opportunity to deny once and for all since Wednesday afternoon.

The post Double game on Navalny: the stability of the Putin system and Merkel's European leadership at stake appeared first on Atlantico Quotidiano .

This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/partita-doppia-su-navalny-in-gioco-la-tenuta-del-sistema-putin-e-la-leadership-europea-della-merkel/ on Fri, 04 Sep 2020 04:15:00 +0000.